Perform Your Own Deliverability Audit

I thought it would be helpful for email marketers to know what it takes to do a comprehensive deliverability audit. Even an email marketer with satisfactory sending results should take an hour or so per month to make sure all the checks and balances are in place. If an email marketer is finding their open rates declining and bounce rates increasing, a thorough audit can almost certainly right the ship.

Check the delivery reportDelivery reports should be closely monitored for blocks and deferrals. All deliverability problems should be handled promptly by first correcting the mailing practice that caused the problem, and then contacting the ISP or blocking organization to get the block lifted. More times than not the contact method is included in the bounce reason.

Do an open rate by domain analysisTake the time to make sure that the top domains within your mailing list are actually opening your message. For example if your mailing list is 15% yahoo.com addresses, but only 3% of your opens are from yahoo.com members, you may have messages bouncing or going to the bulk folder. Hotmail is notorious for filtering messages, meaning that they do not deliver the message to the recipient, but they do not bounce it back to the sender. An easy way to determine if this is happening is to look at the open report.Audit complaintsSpam complaints are the biggest cause of deliverability problems. Email marketers need to closely monitor complaints reported through feedback loops, complaints sent to the messages’ reply-to address, or complaints sent directly to the abuse account for the ‘from addresses’ domain. Using this data, marketers can isolate the source of the complaints, take corrective action, and prevent potential delivery problems.Moving the unsubscribe link to the top of the message content and making it more noticeable can greatly reduce the complaint rate – by as much as 75%!

Test the unsubscribe linkNothing will generate spam complaints faster than an unsubscribe link that is hard to locate, overly involved, or not functioning properly. A quick test message to a personal account can quickly check to verify that the unsubscribe process is easy to find, easy to use and working properly.

Check the SPF recordMany ISPs - big and small – will use SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to verify the mail is actually coming from who claims to be sending it. SPF records, included in the senders’ DNS, have become a key tool in preventing ‘from address’ forgery.

Send to a customized seed listSend to email accounts created solely for testing. All the big ISP’s offer free email accounts, so open one or two accounts per ISP. Sending to this list of addresses can provide insight into whether the message is going to the inbox, bulk folder, or is being filtered by the ISP. These test accounts are also an excellent way to check message rendering, and to verify that the message’s ‘call to action’ is above the scroll bar fold. Sending to these seed addresses before, during, and after a mail campaign can be very helpful in gauging overall deliverability to major ISP’s.

Check your IP address’ SenderScoreEven though it is somewhat of a marketing tool for ReturnPath, the SenderScore does provide a quick analysis of your mailing server’s IP address. The score uses several factors to rate the IP from 0 to 100 (with 100 being the best). Low scores can lead to deliverability problems. For your IP’s score and score details go to https://www.senderscore.org/. When at the site take notice of how inconsistent message volume can hurt a sender’s overall reputation. You can also use this site to see if your sending IP address is currently listed by any blacklist organizations.

Periodically reviewing some or all of the seven suggestions above will not only help identify deliverability problems, but will also give email marketers a better understanding of the challenges they face when it comes to getting messages to their list members. It will also allow senders to fine tune campaigns to increase the ever important ROI.